The Lure

Fred Chandler’s poem, “The Lure” was published in the latest issue of Voices Israel Annual Anthology.

A day after walking on Laguna Beach in California, the image of a bird’s footprints wiped away by the last turn of the ocean’s wave proceeded to haunt him. This generated a poem, rising within him as a bird taking flight, and thereby came “The Lure.” This is a poem vividly recalling a single grey bird, the mark it leaves behind imprinting the sand behind it, and the last remnant of a wave that washes the bird’s tracks away. The bird takes flight, disappearing “into a dark diaphanous horizon,” and the narrator of the poem then loses sight of everything. The poem’s silent imagery is a meditation on temporality, the impermanence of life’s traces, and the subsequent gaze of the witness producing a consciousness from within, one of simultaneous recovery and loss.